Invention and use of jump ropes is known to the public, as they have been used as a form of cardiovascular exercise for many years. However, over the years jump ropes have become increasingly popular not only as a form of exercise but also a means of entertainment among children. Thus, innumerable sizes, styles and colors of jump ropes have been created to appeal to the tastes of children. One such modification of the jump rope has been to add a sound feature to the rope as it is rotated.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,778,053 issued to Jay Smith, Gerald Schmidt and Lawrence T. Jones discloses a jump rope that produces a musical tone when it is rotated. The jump rope comprises an elongated flexible hollow tube with a plurality of apertures extending through the skin of the tube near its mid-length. The ends of the tube are rotatively connected to the ends of a pair of handles. At least one of these handles has a bulbous chamber forming a portion of the handle, with the interior of the chamber in communication with the interior of the tube. The outer end of the bulbous chamber flares into a bell-like horn section to form the other portion of the handle. A reed is positioned in the handle, approximately between the bulbous chamber and the horn section.
Thus, when the jump rope is in use and the tube swings around the user's body, the movement of the tube causes air to quickly pass over the tube's apertured surface. The centrifugal forces generated within the tube combined with the outside air passing over the apertured surfaces of the tube move air from the interior of the tube through the tube apertures. This evacuation of the interior of the tubing causes air to be drawn in, through the one handle, into the interior of the tube. As the air passes through the handle, it actuates the reed to set it in vibration. The bulbous chamber functions as a resonance cavity to cooperate with the reed to produce a musical tone which is amplified by the horn section of the handle.
While the reference illustrates that the invention is capable of producing musical tones consistent with the rotation of the rope, it also exposes several inherent drawbacks of the invention. First of all, the invention is a relatively simple system that produces sound through a series of apertures and a reed without requiring an internal electrical circuit. While this allows musical tones to be generated without using batteries, it limits the capacity of the rope to merely producing an erratic, limited range of tones, depending upon the velocity of the rope and the resulting vibration of the reed. Furthermore, this invention is constructed so that every time the rope is swung, a tone is produced. The invention has no provision to terminate the musical tones when desired. This limitation can become particularly aggravating when the rope is used by small children, who may tend to incessantly swing it at inappropriate times and places, leaving parents no option but to endure the resulting noise or confiscate the rope altogether.
In 1992, Peter Yeh introduced U.S. Pat. No. 5,137,488, detailing a sports rod equipped with sound reproducer. The rod is composed mainly of a first rod case and a second rod case, both being of hollow construction and made of plastic material by injection molding. The first and the second rod cases join to form a rod-shaped body with the central portion forming a hand grip and with both ends being circularly headed. The sports rod includes a sound reproducer, which in turn is provided with a speaker mounted on the speaker mount, and a circuit board containing an integrated circuit with music or exercise commands stored programmably therein. When the switch of the sports rod is turned on, the sound reproducing device of the sports rod begins producing the sound of music or exercise commands stored in the integrated circuit thereof.
However, while this reference discloses a sports rod that can produce a variety of music and sounds at the discretion of the user, it does not teach a jump rope-type rod and use. Instead, this prior art is designed to be used in place of a cheerleader's pompon or the like, for aesthetically pleasing waving and movement. The music feature of the prior art can be turned on and off, but the resulting music has no relation to the movement of the rod. Therefore, this invention is incapable of providing music at a tempo regulated by the movement of the invention. The present invention fulfills these needs and provides further related advantages.